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Chinatown

By The Times Arts Correspondents

August 9 1974, 1:00am, The Times

As a boy growing up in Stalinist Poland, Roman Polanski first read Raymond Chandler’s novels in a Polish translation. I am not sure how far this slightly recondite scrap of information is relevant to Chinatown, Polanski’s consummate new private eye thriller. But although the film is set in 1937, in that stretch of the past which Hollywood is most busy revisiting, it is evident that unfocused nostalgia for unremembered times - otherwise known as the Gatsby syndrome - is not at all its purpose. The ghosts being laid are more precise and more strange; among them perhaps that of a Philip Marlowe first encountered as an unusually exotic alien. Chinatown is also Chandlertown; and still a pretty good place to set a movie.

Dashiell Hammett,…

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